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A review by esdeecarlson
The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club by Doug Henderson
2.0
**This book was provided to me by NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.**
2 stars
Initially, this seemed like an excellent book for me. I’m a queer nerd, and I love a book about a group of wildly different people joined together by a shared interest. In fact, I think that had I read this book as a high schooler, I would have really connected with it, particularly because the book focuses a great deal on feeling adrift and unsure of the future, and searching for a connection with another person when you feel ‘different’ from everyone else.
Reading it now, however, I didn’t find myself enjoying the story as I had expected to. Although all of the characters save one are in their early- to mid-twenties, most of them (save Mooneyham, who along with his boyfriend Huey was easily my favorite) felt much more like teenagers. None of the characters were particularly developed, and I was disappointed that the book leaned into stereotypes about the type of people who play tabletop games.
I was also perturbed by the amount of isolation the nerdy characters felt due to being nerdy; the story is clearly set in the present day, but apparently in this fictionalized Cleveland, D&D is still treated like leprosy. In actual fact, the game has enjoyed enormous popularity and growing mainstream visibility in recent years. Geeks are cool in 2021… except in Cleveland, apparently. And that wasn’t the only ‘out-of-time’ aspect of the story that jarred me; a number of mannerisms and setting ‘color’ seemed more at home in the mid-2000s than the modern day.
There was also a subplot about vampire LARPers that didn’t go anywhere and felt unfinished. These characters were such sketched-in stereotypes that they felt like they’d be more appropriate as background antagonists in a nerdy webcomic than actual characters in a novella.
I think this book would appeal primarily to a Young Adult audience, particularly young queer teens struggling with how to juggle all the different aspects of their identity along with the confusing expectations of rapidly-approaching adulthood. For many people, this could be a new favorite book. For me, however, the characters and writing were lacking.
2 stars
Initially, this seemed like an excellent book for me. I’m a queer nerd, and I love a book about a group of wildly different people joined together by a shared interest. In fact, I think that had I read this book as a high schooler, I would have really connected with it, particularly because the book focuses a great deal on feeling adrift and unsure of the future, and searching for a connection with another person when you feel ‘different’ from everyone else.
Reading it now, however, I didn’t find myself enjoying the story as I had expected to. Although all of the characters save one are in their early- to mid-twenties, most of them (save Mooneyham, who along with his boyfriend Huey was easily my favorite) felt much more like teenagers. None of the characters were particularly developed, and I was disappointed that the book leaned into stereotypes about the type of people who play tabletop games.
I was also perturbed by the amount of isolation the nerdy characters felt due to being nerdy; the story is clearly set in the present day, but apparently in this fictionalized Cleveland, D&D is still treated like leprosy. In actual fact, the game has enjoyed enormous popularity and growing mainstream visibility in recent years. Geeks are cool in 2021… except in Cleveland, apparently. And that wasn’t the only ‘out-of-time’ aspect of the story that jarred me; a number of mannerisms and setting ‘color’ seemed more at home in the mid-2000s than the modern day.
There was also a subplot about vampire LARPers that didn’t go anywhere and felt unfinished. These characters were such sketched-in stereotypes that they felt like they’d be more appropriate as background antagonists in a nerdy webcomic than actual characters in a novella.
I think this book would appeal primarily to a Young Adult audience, particularly young queer teens struggling with how to juggle all the different aspects of their identity along with the confusing expectations of rapidly-approaching adulthood. For many people, this could be a new favorite book. For me, however, the characters and writing were lacking.